The Week of the Dead

by Viktor Longfellow

  Mr. Harrison recapped the bottle of pills and stuffed them and the letter into his pocket as he walked to the door. When he opened the door slightly to see if something was happening, he looked across the hall to find Phil standing in his doorway with a wooden baseball bat. Being a fan of all sports, Phil littered his apartment building with memorabilia. As Mr. Harrison opened the door wider, he could see his neighbor standing in a defensive position with his baseball bat cocked in his hands tightly like a barbarian swinging an axe at the heads of invaders. There was a scream from down the corridor. “Psst, Phil! Did you hear that?” he whispered across the hall.

  Phil spoke in a quiet voice so he wouldn’t wake his son. His son could sleep through a tornado, but somehow Phil thought he couldn’t talk louder than a whisper. “Yeah, I don’t like it. I’ve got a funny feeling about it.”

  “Who do you think it was?” asked Mr. Harrison.

  “I don’t know. But this is a quiet place, and this stuff doesn’t usually happen here,” Phil responded as he choked his hands around the bat in an uneasy fashion.

  “Hey, call the cops. Let them deal with it,” Phil said as his eyes darted back to his son’s little foot sticking off the sofa.

  “OK,” said Mr. Harrison as he left the door open and walked to his phone by his recliner. “Hello…Hello…Hello!” Mr. Harrison shouted into the phone.

  “Shut it, old man, you’re going to alert whoever the hell that was!” Phil loudly whispered.

  “The line is dead. No one picked up.”

  “Well, fuck! Hang on, let me try.” Phil walked away to get his house phone. At the same time around the corner from their hall, a red face appeared. A man of normal height, wearing a postal-office uniform, or what used to be a uniform, came in full view of Mr. Harrison, who was standing in the hallway. Mr. Harrison glanced out of the corner of his eye, to find the postal-office worker trudging near him. “Hey, buddy, are you all right?” Mr. Harrison asked in an alarmed tone.

  The postal worker said nothing. He just gazed at Harrison with bloodshot eyes and dragging his left leg behind him. The postal man released a grown as if he was in pain, which caught Harrison’s attention. “Oh my goodness! Are you all right?” exclaimed Harrison. There was no response from the slow-limping postal worker. Harrison then noticed the face of the man. Phil thought that some of the bastard children in his building were playing a joke on them, until Harrison noticed something sticking out of the postman’s back that looked as if something was attached to the man’s back that was causing him such pain. As the postal worker came closer to Mr. Harrison, he extended his arms and opened his mouth as if to speak, but what Harrison saw was an open mouth filled with razor-sharp, blood-soaked teeth. He stood there, frightened as the postal worker came closer and closer; slowly but surely, Harrison realized that this was not a joke.

  As Harrison backed into his apartment, he caught the attention of Phil, who was still dialing 911, and the postal worker leaped on top of Mr. Harrison. The postal worker had enough force to knock Mr. Harrison onto the kitchen tile floor of his apartment. With both hands pressed against the postman’s face, Mr. Harrison released a “Help!” from his lungs that were being pressed in between the floor and the body of a blood-soaked stranger. Whatever this was, Mr. Harrison didn’t want it around him. With all his might, he pressed the jaw of his attacker closed. All the strength a seventy-year-old man could muster, a man who was about to kill himself because he didn’t want to be alone, was now in the death grip of a psycho. The more Harrison pressed against the chin, the more he noticed that the thing sticking out of its back was the handle of a kitchen knife.

  With all the commotion, Phil ran in, baseball bat still in hand. “What the fuck is this!” he said as he blindly swung the bat at the uniformed man. The bat cracked against the postman’s spine—one, two, three, four. It was unyielding. On the fifth swing, Phil caught the bat on the back of the attacker’s skull. With the clack of the baseball bat, the postman’s body fell limp and began to seizure on top of Mr. Harrison. “Holy fuck! Holy fuck! What the fuck!” He took a few deep breathes.

  “Harrison, are you all right?” Phil said as he pushed the twitching body off his old neighbor.

  Harrison lay on the cold tile floor of his apartment looking up at Phil, who was pointing the baseball bat at the twitching thing on the floor. “Hell no, I’m not all right! What the hell is going on?” Harrison stood up to see the twitching body of the postal man trying to slither like a snake in fury. “That isn’t human!” Harrison explained as he slowly stood up, pulling the kitchen knife out of the violently trembling body that soaked his carpet with blood.

  “What the hell do we do? Did you call the cops?” Harrison expelled from his fatigued body.

  “No, I couldn’t get through. Harrison, are you bleeding?”

  Harrison looked down, bewildered at the amount of blood on his freshly pressed button-down shirt and tie. “I…I don’t think so,” Harrison explained, still pumping with adrenaline from his encounter. “What do we do now?”

  “Lock him in here until we know what to do. Harrison, come to my place, and wash all that shit off,” Phil said as he gave the man on the floor another good connection of the baseball bat to the back.

  TIME FOR WORK

  CHAPTER 5

  MONDAY 0700 CST

  MEMPHIS

  Devin was dressed in a denim one-piece jumpsuit with safety glasses and earphones. He clocked in at his stationary time stamp. Of all the things he hated, it was this damn time stamp. Even though Devin had worked at this junkyard for a while, he never got used to the sound of the time stamp. He would put his timecard in and wait, and then, with a nudge of his thumb, slam! The stamper would come down with a monstrous vibration. As for every morning, he made his rounds through the office turning on lights and making the coffee.

  The pavilion was where Devin and his coworkers—Frank, a dwarf with anger issues, and Gary, a former alcoholic trying to straighten out his life—stripped vehicles for parts, took the car to the crusher, and sold the steel for profit. In the office, there was Robert, the owner, and his daughter, Erica, his bookkeeper. Robert inherited the junkyard from his dad. He never wanted much out of life, just a family and a stable job. He was glad to work alongside his daughter. Erica, a nineteen-year-old college student, was good with math and liked the simple life just as well. She stood about five and a half feet tall, had long red hair, and a pale skin with freckles. She always wore sundresses and flats to work. She was comfortable around grease monkeys and their sailor language.

  Sometimes, without her father knowing, she would go into the junkyard and drink beer with Frank and Devin. Since Robert had given Devin a job when he desperately needed it, Devin always treated Erica like a little sister, defending her from asshole customers, giving her a ride home when her car had problems. One time, a young man came into the shop and started screaming at Erica. It was her boyfriend at the time; he grabbed her around the wrists and was yelling at her because she wouldn’t give him money. Little did he know that Devin was standing behind him armed with a tire iron.

  Devin was a man of morals, and one of his morals was not to harm a woman, physically or emotionally. By the time the young man had enough sense to turn around, Devin was whacking him in the back of the leg with his tire iron. When the kid dropped to his knees, Devin bent down and whispered something into his ear. Ever since then, Devin had become Erica’s protector in Robert’s eyes.

  At ten o’clock every morning, Robert arrived at the junkyard; Erica arrived a few minutes later in her 1981 VW beetle. Robert was dressed in an old, dirty collared shirt and khakis. He always wanted the customers to think that he had a hand in retrieving their parts from the yard. Erica, without a doubt, arrived in a blue, horizontally streaked sundress with zebra-print flat shoes, earrings that dangled, and her long red hair tied in a ponytail. As Erica entered the office, she saw her dad sitting at his open desk with a bandage on his right hand. “Dad, did you get into a fight?�
� Erica said, as she put her heavy purse down in a chair.

  “No, it’s nothing,” he explained.

  “You can’t just tell me that it’s ‘nothing,’ Dad. Now, what happened?” she expelled with her demanding eyes and folded arms.

  “I went to the bar last night on Riverside. Had a couple of drinks. When I came outside, there was some hobo. He was walking slowly toward me. I noticed that he was bleeding pretty badly. I thought he was looking for some help, so when I got to him, I asked him if he was OK, and he just moaned at me. When I went for my cell phone, he grabbed my hand, and he…he just bite me,” he said with questioning eyes. “Since I had a couple of Black Label straights in me, I…I panicked and punched him in the face a few times and went home.”

  NO NEWS

  CHAPTER 6

  MONDAY 0900 EST

  PHILADELPHIA

  Mr. Harrison stood in the shower, as the warm water ran down his naked body; he couldn’t help but recall what had just happened. There he was about to end all his sufferings and then being attacked by a man in a postal uniform with a face covered with blood and eyes as red as fire. Thanks to Phil, Mr. Harrison survived the ordeal. Armed with the paring knife that was stuck in the postal man’s back, Harrison and Phil locked the postman in Harrison’s apartment, and they flew across the hall to Phil’s apartment.

  When Harrison got out of the shower, Phil had laid some fresh clothes on the master bed to Harrison to change into. His nice suit and his late wife’s favorite tie were soaked in blood from the close contact Harrison had with the postman. The clothes laid out were a pair of jogging pants, a plain white shirt, and one of Phil’s Redwing hockey jerseys. As Harrison was getting dressed, he peered out the bedroom door, to find Phil, with his phone in hand, and his son, Paul, glued to the television. At this instant, Harrison, now fully dressed, walked out to them and saw what they were looking at. It was a news broadcaster, who he himself looked like he had just gotten out of bed and forced himself in front of a television camera.

  On the television, there were reports of strange people coming out of rivers and oceans, with bloodshot eyes and many rows of teeth, attacking people left and right. Those who were attacked rose from the dead and began to feed on the living. The newscaster then went to a video posted from a hospital of people standing in line, who had strange bite marks on them everywhere from hands, feet, necks, and thighs. Then suddenly the person holding the camera fell to the ground. The camera maneuvered to the left and the right, but all that was seen was the camera man lying on the ground as four or five sickly looking people began to eat him. The newscaster then came back on the screen and informed the people to stay inside and lock themselves away from the world. Then the newscaster also informed them that the only way to stop the strange people was to remove the head or sever the brain stem. As he was talking, they showed a diagram of a normal human’s anatomy, with highlighted areas of the head, brain, and brain stem, which was located at the base of the skull. He then said that the military was nowhere to be found.

  Phil turned to see Harrison standing there in awe; Phil stood up, with his bat in hand, and told Harrison to strip. “I don’t want you to eat my son,” he said. Harrison then took off his jersey and shirt to reveal old wrinkled skin but no bite marks.

  “I do appreciate these clothes, by the way,” Harrison said as he put them back on.

  “You’re welcome. The cops aren’t picking up the phone. I don’t know what to do,” Phil commented.

  “The news anchor said we should stay indoors. I think that’s the best plan,” Harrison remarked.

  “Well, that’s all fine and dandy. However, this place isn’t safe. I haven’t been to the grocery this week, and that thing was already in the building. And the only thing that separates us from that thing in your room is two very thin doors,” Phil said.

  “Do you have any ideas?” Harrison asked politely.

  “Just one, hey Paul, do you know where Uncle Hank took you hunting that one time?”

  JEFF AND HENRY

  CHAPTER 7

  MONDAY 1100 CST

  OHIO

  Jeff was busy at his desk. Inside the Department of Homeland Security, it was an average day. Jeff worked in his cubicle. With a bagel hanging from his mouth, he typed away. His phone rang. Jeff never received calls, especially this early in the morning. He put the bagel down, brushed the crumbs from his tie, and picked up the phone. “This is Givens,” Jeff spoke in the phone.

  “Givens, this is Johnson. Stop all transmissions. Operation Clear Sweep is in play. I say again, this is not a drill. Operation Clear Sweep is in play.” With that Johnson hung up the phone. Jeff hung up his phone. His heart began to race. The cubical next to him began to ring. After a moment all Jeff heard was “Are you sure, sir?” from the other side of the divider.

  Jeff ended whatever program he was on. He opened his command prompt and began typing away. He opened the locked drawer at his knee and brought out a binder and quickly began transferring what was on the paper into the command prompt.

  He stopped. He looked at his code, and he pressed Enter. He spun in his chair and went to stand. His cubical mate was still there typing. Jeff exited the front door to find two military Humvees and four men standing with automatic weapons and another man in a flight suit with a large case sitting on the ground. “Are you Specialist Givens?” the one in the beret spoke.

  “Jeff Givens,” he said as he extended his hand. The one in the beret skipped the open hand.

  “Get in. We are your armored transport to the Secondary Protocol. Is the package in transport?”

  “Yes, sir,” Givens said as he got in the Humvee. The other man in the flight suit got in and sat the large case in his lap. “We’re airborne, Captain!” The man in the flight suit opened the case and folded it out. Part of the case landed in Jeff’s lap. “Sorry, bro, we’re doing shit for real.” The flight suit had the name Henry. Henry finished opening the crate.

  Jeff looked over and saw a joystick lock into position. Henry looked at Jeff as he waited for the syncing of his laptop device. “It’s a flight-control modulator! Eyes in the sky!” Henry said. Jeff was taken aback. The DHS building didn’t have any televisions, and the Internet access was blocked. Jeff didn’t know what was happening until they left the parking lot. Jeff’s gaze went upward when he heard the engine of a drone.

  THE IVANS

  CHAPTER 8

  MONDAY 1130 CST

  MEMPHIS

  As Erica went on about her work, she heard the door chime. It was too early for customers, but it was never too early for deliveries. She looked up from her desk and saw three men standing in front of her. The one in the middle was a balding man, with finger tattoos, and when he smiled at her, she saw his gold teeth. “Hello, I am here to see Robert,” he said in a thick Russian accent.

  “May I ask your name, sir?” Erica interrogated.

  “Yes, my name is Ivan, and these are my associates, Ivan and Ivan. Will you please tell him that we wish to speak to him?” The lead Ivan pronounced.

  “Certainly,” Erica said as she picked up her phone. “Dad, there are three Ivans here to see you.” At that moment, Robert opened the door, looking sickly and pale.

  “Ah, hello, Robert. We have some business to attend to; you look like you could use some sunshine. Let us go outside in the sunshine and talk,” Lead Ivan said as he led Robert to the pavilion along with the two bigger Ivans following in tow.

  Outside, the two larger Ivans held the sickly looking Robert up against the hood of a rusted 1957 Chevy Bel-Air. As the two Ivans held Robert’s hands, the smaller Ivan started slapping him. “Where is my money?” Ivan exclaimed as his hand hit Robert’s pale face.

  “I don’t have it!”

  Ivan countered, “Why not? I lent you money. You pay me back money. How is this not fair deal?” He said with his thick Russian accent. As Ivan got tired of hitting Robert in the face, he got the Ivan who was holding down his right hand to punch him in the face w
ith his grapefruit-sized hands. The smaller Ivan began to grow impatient.

  “Well, if you do not have money, then I can take payment from somewhere else,” he said as he began to eye in the direction of Erica. “She is your daughter, yes?” Robert tried to scream, but the bigger Ivan was holding his monstrous hand over Robert’s mouth. “I think I will go talk to the pretty woman; maybe she and I can do some business.” As the lead Ivan walked back toward the building, he turned to say something in Russian; the two larger Ivans nodded in compliance and began to savagely beat Robert.

  Inside the office of the junkyard, Erica was calmly filing paperwork. The office was soundproof, to prevent customers from hearing what really happens to their cars when they deposit them at the junkyard. Most of the time, Devin, Frank, and Gary would do as they were told and take the cars to the crusher for the valuable steel chassis. Sometimes the guys took the vehicles to the back of the yard and had a little anger management on the vehicles. Gary, usually the calm one, would take a crowbar and start bashing out the windows. Devin would take his utility knife, which was latched onto his belt, and start destroying the seats. Frank, on the other hand, would wait for them to finish and until they were usually out of breath. Frank would go to his workstation in the back of the yard and pull out his twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun. He would take pleasure in buying stuffed animals, setting them in or on top of the vehicles, and start blowing them to pieces with his double barrel. This was heaven to Frank.

  The back door chimed as Ivan walked in. Erica was steadily working, so she paid him no attention. As Ivan propped the door open with a cinder block, he wanted Robert to see what he was about to do. “Excuse me, young lady,” Ivan said to Erica in a calming manner.